Two ‘old friends’ going up for bids at auction

Saturday

Sep 7, 2013 at 7:00 AM

A car and tractor from the columnist's past will go on the auction block in a few days.

My brother Kevin and his wife Tina like to go to auctions. They browse the websites of local auctioneers looking for anything that might be of interest.Last week they spotted an auction on Jim Folger’s site. Kevin forwarded the sale bill to me with a note that “the first two items look very familiar” — a 1937 John Deere Model B tractor and a 1947 Studebaker.The seller was Harold Schieler and the auction was set for 11 a.m. next Wednesday, Sept. 11, on the farm at the end of West South Street.Both items certainly were familiar. Harold bought them from our dad, Harold Clarke, and grandmother, Katherine Johnson, in the mid-70s.He has held on to them over the years and I was aware he still had them. We occasionally cross paths over coffee at McDonald’s and last spring he said he was planning to sell them along with some other choice items from his once-extensive collection of antique John Deere equipment and other things ancient.About 10 years ago Schieler, a retired farmer, had two or three very large sales cleaning out several buildings of antique tractors, machinery, tools and other odds and ends he had accumulated over the years. But through it all, he never sold the “B” or the Studebaker.He kept the tractor, he said, because it was the same make and model of the first tractor his father owned. He never really said why he kept the car but it is an unusual model and he liked to tinker with it. He got it running again and I actually saw him driving it down the four-lane one day years ago.Dad purchased the John Deere at Taylor & Son around 1958. The 1937 B is a small, light, tricycle-type tractor, one of the first produced when farmers were transitioning from horses to mechanization on the farm.Dad was farming with two tractors — a powerful 1944 Farmall “M” (now owned and still in use by Denny Nelson in rural Kewanee) and smaller 1949 VAC Case. He needed a third to unload corn into the crib during harvest so he wouldn’t have to hook and unhook the Case which he used to haul in the wagons with the 2-row New Idea picker mounted on the Farmall.He also used it to cut hay with a pull-type sickle bar mower, and to pull back the rope lifting bales from the rack into the barn when we “made” hay.The 2-cylinder tractor uses a long lever on the right side of the seat as the clutch and to start it you have to stand on the ground beside the tractor